By George Ward
The CEO of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, has refuted allegations that the network outages experienced by Solana were a result of its on-chain voting system and a high influx of validator messages congesting its consensus layer.
DBCryptoX Cites Reasons For Solana Network Outages
On Monday, the Solana Foundation stated in a post that the reason behind the 20-hour network outage is still unclear. Hence, the CEO addressed speculations that Solana’s integration of on-chain votes is a “significant design flaw” responsible for the network’s multiple outages.
A few days after the Solana network shutdown, DBCryptoX, a prominent Twitter user, posted a controversial thread alleging that a high volume of on-chain votes and validator messages were congesting the network.
However, Yankovenko responded on Twitter 20 minutes later, dismissing the theory as originating from “pure ignorance.” According to Yakovenko, the votes are integrated into a “single giant quorum.”
This integration enhances security, enables high throughput, and lowers fees at the same time. However, Yakovenko did not directly deny DBCryptoX’s assertion that validator messages and on-chain votes make up 90-95% of Solana’s transactions.
According to DBCryptoX, this led to the “bogging down” of the system. Furthermore, DBCryptoX noted that the network outages lasted for 20 hours which is a long time.
This is because the process of validators meeting and coming to a consensus requires significant time when conducted off-chain using a messaging system such as Discord. On the other hand, Alex Kroeger, a software engineer at Solana-based Wallet Phantom, stated that the network outages likely do not have a single cause.
Kroeger added that proof-of-stake system validators require extensive network communication to accomplish validation.
Crypto Community Tired Of Continuous Network Outages
Although the network is back up and functioning, the crypto community is becoming weary of the frequent network disruptions on Solana. Most of them took to Twitter after the shutdown to voice their displeasure with the constant network outages.
One member argued that the outages might expose decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols operating on Solana to the risk of becoming insolvent. Amidst the network’s problems, an NFT artist named Crypto Tea raised doubts about the Solana blockchain.
In her tweet, she questioned the inclusion of Solana in the top 10 list of cryptocurrencies as it was undergoing a coordinated restart due to a technical issue that caused transaction throttling and unexpected blockchain forking.